Under France’s ancien régime, marriages of whatever class were largely made for the economic convenience of parents and had little to do with the personal feelings or wishes of offspring. Young girls–those subordinate beings, in the eyes of both religious authority and natural philosophy–could be wed to men three times their age, gave over their dowries and all property to the husband’s management, and had no separate legal power, aside from what inheritance rights might have been formalized in a prior marriage contract. By a lettre de cachet, a secret indictment, the husband could have his wife committed to a nunnery for life.
Ardent critics of a status quo that imprisoned children in parental choices based on status and property, Enlightenment thinkers attacked marriage as a tyrannical sacrament: indissoluble, it was an insupportable form of bondage foisted on society by a corrupt and superstitious Church. But the impetus of the philosophes was an anticlerical one. Condorcet apart, who was married to the brilliant salon hostess Sophie de Grouchy, they were hardly proponents of marriages based on love.
Rousseau may have thrown the thousands across Europe who read La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), in one of its seventy editions before 1800, into ecstasies and torments. He may have taught them the new romantic language of the emotions and shown them in Émile (1762), his treatise on education, that in adolescence the troubled boy turns into that ‘loving and feeling being’ who becomes a man only by learning ‘sentiment’. But Rousseau’s lovers, who in La Nouvelle Héloïse recast the great twelfth-century love of Abelard and Héloïse, were never permitted marriage. Rousseau’s heroine Julie, rather than marry her beloved tutor Saint-Preux, engages in a paternally sanctioned union. She grows ‘virtuous’–that word that had migrated from the ancients into the different register of Christianity, to return in this period and take on republican notions of heroism once more–through motherhood and devotion to duty, before dying as the result of trying to save her child from drowning. Meanwhile her heart-broken lover weds her best friend. Old marital conventions remain intact in Rousseau. Like many of the Enlighteners, he kept marriage and romantic love or passion decidedly separate.
The atmosphere of the salons the philosophes attended in some ways paralleled the old courts of love. Here dazzling, intellectual and married women were at the helm. Madame d’Épinay’s salon was attended by Rousseau, Diderot, Holbach, d’Alembert and Baron von Grimm. Her intimate, Madame de Necker, entertained both the philosophes and writers such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Madame de Condorcet, reputedly the most brilliant of all, entertained amongst many other notables Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, whom she translated, and the feminist Olympe de Gouges who early in the Revolution was to write the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. These women were courted and paid heed to. Affairs, even long-lasting ones, were engaged in: Voltaire’s with the formidable Marquise du Châtelet, translator of Newton, and his companion in scientific and philosophic pursuits, spanned more than a decade. But the philosophes’ sense of the appropriate role for the huge mass of women within marriage was one that enshrined virtue, piety and obedience to their husbands. Double standards were emphatically in place. Even the notorious Madame de Staël–three times exiled by her fierce, tyrannical opponent Napoleon; a woman known to all the intellectuals of the continent and a mass of readers; a woman whose many passions were open and vociferous and included Benjamin Constant, and who, as she turned fifty, married a handsome young hussar (though, as she herself said, her father was her greatest love and the man she would have married)–could do little to change that hard fact.
There was only one brief moment before the twentieth century when French law fully overrode property considerations and sanctioned affectionate marriage above and beyond any familial wishes. In 1792, in the midst of a Revolution whose leaders were intent on wresting power from the Church and promoting liberty and happiness, marriage became a matter of free choice between consenting adults over twenty-one. No longer a sacrament, weddings were now conducted by local mayors in a civil ceremony. Patriarchal power was further reduced by the implementation of laws governing the family. Daughters and sons were granted equal inheritance rights. Before the courts, married women were given the same rights as fathers regarding the welfare of their children. Illegitimate children were treated on a par with legitimate ones. Crucially, divorce was permitted by mutual consent and the grounds were broad: incompatibility of temperament, matrimonial fault–for instance, insanity, cruelty, dissolute behaviour–desertion for a minimum of two years, emigration or absence without news for five years. In distinct contravention of earlier Church rules, the divorced were free to remarry a partner of their choice.
The state of marriage under the ancien régime can be judged by the sudden overwhelming surge in divorce figures, particularly in the cities. Between 1792 and 1803 some thirty thousand divorces were granted. Women of the lower and upper bourgeoisie, suddenly empowered in this domain at least, were quick to cite matrimonial fault as their reason for seeking divorce: violence was evidently widespread. Given the upheavals of Revolutionary times, desertion also figures large in the divorce records.
But this decidedly revolutionary marriage regime was short-lived. Napoleon reversed the tide, partly, historians speculate, because of his personal experience. His passion for Joséphine de Beauharnais, a high-ranking, widowed Creole sophisticate–member of the elite, racy circle known as the merveilleuses–had resulted in a love marriage on 9 March 1796, just days before he embarked on his Italian campaign. Joséphine, the name Napoleon gave her to replace her own of Rose, was six years older than his twenty-six. After her husband and the father of her two children was guillotined, she had had several influential lovers, including Napoleon’s own political patron.
Napoleon’s love was real enough, though inevitably in the circumstances propelled by ambitious rivalry. In February 1797 in one of many ardent letters, he addressed her as: ‘You to whom nature has given spirit, sweetness, and beauty, you who alone can move and rule my heart, you who know all too well the absolute empire you exercise over it!’But during his absence, Josephine quickly engaged in an affair with a young hussar. When Napoleon learned of it, he took on a mistress. Their relations were rarely less than tumultuous, and were further strained by her inability to produce an heir. Yet the empress of his heart, when he acceded to the title of Emperor in December 1804, did join him on the throne. Divorce would follow only six years later. This had the further effect of testing the Concordat with the Pope that Napoleon had signed in 1801 and which had officially returned Catholicism to France. Strategically, Napoleon then married Marie-Louise of Austria, a wedding the cardinals of France refused to attend.
Often misogynistic in his pronouncements, Napoleon is said to have remarked that this time he had married ‘a womb’. He would legislate for just this in his laws on marriage. Marie-Louise dutifully produced an heir, though Napoleon II reigned for only two weeks, in 1814, and died at the age of twenty-one; it was Joséphine’s heirs by her earlier marriage who would eventually gain the succession. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s dying words have a wonderfully free-associative quality and give the trump card of his chronicle to Joséphine: ‘France, army, head of the army, Joséphine.’
Under the Code Napoléon of 1804, married women were once more, like children, returned to the full control of their husbands, who exercised both marital and paternal authority. The new bourgeois marriage followed the old aristocratic codes: property and legitimate progeny were paramount. Women’s inferiority in the union was spelled out: they owed submission to ‘the man who is to become the arbiter of their fate’. Affection took second place to reinforcing the traditional family. Wives needed their husband’s agreement in seeking employment. He took charge of any earnings and looked after their joint assets. Though she might have some rights by prior marriage contract over any property she had brought into the marriage, he remained the final arbiter of her goods and property and could have recourse to violence–though not such that ca
used public disorder–if she rebelled against his authority. Under the Divorce Law of 1803 husbands were allowed to divorce their wives on grounds of adultery, but women could only sue if the adultery had taken place in the family home. The Code shored up what became the conventional marriage in post-Revolutionary France. This was one in which the wife was honoured for her purity, her maternal abilities, the numerous children the French state (with its constant worries, throughout the century and beyond, over equalling Germany’s birth-rate) expected of her, and her rectitude, leaving the husband free to pursue affairs of the loins and heart elsewhere.
Apart from the rather more open acquiescence to a double standard, a different code of ‘respectability’, bourgeois marriage in nineteenth-century France was in its quotidian aspects not poles apart from what it was in Victorian England. Men were the principal, though in the working and artisan classes hardly the sole, breadwinners. Presumed to be of lesser intelligence, kept far from education, wives softened the trials of the public and industrial spheres for their husbands and had ornamental, perhaps even spiritual value, in their role as ‘poets of the hearth’, as Madame Romieu put it in her mid-nineteenth-century guidebook for girls–or as ‘angel of the house’, as Coventry Patmore wrote in his 1854 poem idealizing domesticity. In Republican France and America, to the wife’s role was added that of being an educator in civic virtues–the subject of many of the guidebooks of the time, which taught women how to instil their children with piety and patriotism. The hearth now also kindled the minds of the dutiful citizens of the future.
In France, as in much of the rest of continental Europe, marriage for the bourgeoisie long continued acceptably and largely to be a mariage de convenance. If love came into marriage’s making, it was as a secondary benefit. Fiction both reflected the real and showed the way. Stendhal’s and Balzac’s heroes and heroines are largely enmeshed in loveless unions of convenience, while grand passions are lived outside their bonds and bounds.
Victorian Marriage
For the Victorians and the North Americans, love-inspired marriages remained the ideal: heart, soul and body–though the last not until the wedding night–were all to be bound into one within an institution that was also the foundation stone of society. Chaste, faithful wives became the keepers of morality, whatever its double standard. Towards the latter part of the century, this labour was more than symbolic. Women campaigned for moral reform and social purity against the commercialized sex of prostitution–the very sex their husbands often bought. Not surprisingly, marriage sometimes foundered under the weight.
Queen Victoria herself set the standard for an ideal union, the very one the romantic fiction available in her youth had evoked. She met her cousin, Prince Albert–who had been delivered three months after her and by the same midwife–when she was just sixteen, and then again at nineteen, by which time she was already Queen. Like all royal marriages of its time, this one was arranged. But her utterances make it clear it was also a love match–though to begin with the carnal attraction seems to have been far more on her side. Albert was, she noted, ‘excessively handsome, such beautiful eyes… my heart is quite going!’ ‘He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.’
As the wedding approached, Victoria suffered qualms: a queen, she would now, nonetheless, like all women of her time, have to obey another. In his biography of her, Lytton Strachey captures the young Queen’s state with impeccable flourish:
she was suddenly prostrated by alarm, regret, and doubt. For two years she had been her own mistress–the two happiest years, by far, of her life. And now it was all to end! She was to come under an alien domination–she would have to promise that she would honour and obey… someone, who might, after all, thwart her, oppose her–and how dreadful that would be! Why had she embarked on this hazardous experiment?… No doubt, she loved Albert; but she loved power too. At any rate, one thing was certain: she might be Albert’s wife, but she would always be Queen of England. He reappeared, in an exquisite uniform, and her hesitations melted in his presence like mist before the sun. On February 10, 1840, the marriage took place.
And if biography and her own letters are to be believed, the two did indeed–despite some early irritation and nine rapid pregnancies which the Queen did not altogether enjoy–live happily ever after. Albert overcame the discomforts of foreignness and the difficulties of being a consort. He established himself in the foreign clime, reorganized the large household, and gradually took over the duties of private secretary, so that Victoria came to depend on his political judgement. The bond between them grew. She prayed most fervently that the Prince of Wales would grow up to ‘resemble his angelic dearest Father in EVERY, EVERY respect, both in body and mind’. Three years into the marriage, she writes rapturously to King Leopold of Belgium, ‘Oh! my dearest uncle, I am sure if you knew HOW happy, how blessed I feel, and how PROUD I feel in possessing SUCH a perfect being as my husband…’
The huge popular and financial success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, devised and planned by Albert, saw her joyous. The event publicly consolidated their coupledom. Her letter to her prime minister just after the Exhibition had closed, on the very anniversary of her betrothal to the Prince–a ‘curious coincidence’–expressed her deep satisfaction that her beloved husband’s name was now universally recognized by the country and for ever immortalized. She was grateful that providence ‘permitted her to be united to so great, so noble, so excellent a Prince’.
When Albert died suddenly, perhaps of typhoid, ten years later, Victoria went into deep mourning. She never abandoned her widow’s black.
The romance of domesticity that was Victoria and Albert’s union writ large could of course hardly be replicated by her subjects. But it set the tone and aspirations for the nation. Victoria had met and married her handsome prince, the union had been blessed with happiness and produced an ample brood: even a queen, it seemed, could be an obedient and dutiful wife.
Yet love, as desirable as it might be, was not as pre-eminent a driving force in the shaping of unions in Victorian England as it had been in the second part of the eighteenth century. Partly as a result of revolutionary upheavals and war throughout Europe, partly because of the rise of a large urban working class whose presence seemed to the ruling classes to demand more authoritarian social structures, attitudes in nineteenth-century England grew more conservative and the family more disciplinarian. Duty trumped individual inclination and was a primary obligation. The support of a family conferred the stamp of respectable masculinity on the male; while for the woman, the smooth running of a household and the duty of maternity were the marks of successful femininity. Within the family, the father’s will was pre-eminent. Even though only the highest echelons of the aristocracy actually arranged marriages, parental agreement, largely tied to questions of class and finance, was essential. Paternal vetoes were not uncommon: letters and diaries of the period describe desperate young women taking to their beds and seeking consolation in long-lasting illness after beloved suitors were pronounced unsuitable or unwanted ones imposed.
In a society where economic independence for middle-class women was all but impossible and work outside of the home frowned upon, marriage, even loveless marriage, was the destiny of choice. The entire education of girls was a preparation for family and the separate sphere. The motherhood it brought was a fundamental obligation: only that conferred status. Families under Victoria grew large: six children or more was not unusual. Though parish records show that most marriages took place when women were aged between twenty-five and twenty-seven, the fear of spinsterhood put pressure on women from adolescence onwards.
Spinsterhood made a woman redundant, ‘an excrescence on the surface of society’, as Mill put it in criticizing the prevailing attitude. The spinster was not only relegated to the humiliating status of poor relation. She also bore the brunt of a medical and scientific discour
se that naturalized maternity as woman’s only destiny. Failing in that was to bear a stigma of mental and physiological malfunction. Beatrice Potter, the youngest of eight daughters and later to become the formidable Fabian intellectual Beatrice Webb, summed up the prevailing ideology in 1883 at the age of twenty-five, pointing to dutiful daughterhood as the only possible form of redemption from the stigmatized single state: ‘It is almost necessary to the health of a woman, physical and mental, to have definite home duties to fulfil: details of practical management, and above all things, someone dependent on her love and tender care. So long as Father lives and his home is the centre for young lives, I have mission enough as a woman.’ In contrast to eighteenth-century self-interest, self-sacrifice was the Victorian social ideal.
Competition amongst women in the marriage market was fierce, and exacerbated by various factors. Since economic independence for middle-class men was a necessity before they could engage in supporting a wife and children at the expected social level, from the 1840s on marriage was often postponed at least until the age of thirty. Equality of social status marked another constraint: convention decreed that one had to marry within one’s social class. Marriageable women outnumbered men: indeed, there was an imbalance in the entire male-to-female population, which grew with the century. In 1851 there were 100 men to every 104.2 women; in 1881 this had risen to 105.5 and in 1911 to 106.8. Boys died in the first year of life in greater numbers than girls, though the skew in figures was also caused by the large number of middle-class men who worked abroad, either in the colonial service or in the armed forces. For every three men who emigrated, only one woman did.
The numerical availability of women did not, however, necessarily make things easier for the man, if a love match was in question. The onus was on the male to make all the first moves, a process complicated by the need for parental consent to courtship, not to mention the ultimate approval to marry. Neither was necessarily easy to come by. Records proliferate of unrequited suitors. Parents wanted the certainty of financial security for their daughters. Fathers seem often to have been reluctant to release a prized daughter who provided household management, alongside affection. Disparities in age could also prove difficult to overcome, since convention–rather than example–had it that too great a difference would sow the seeds of later problems: a ‘lovesick’ suitor of forty might easily find himself rebuffed both by parents and by the far younger woman in question. Prime Minister William Gladstone’s son, Stephen, at the age of thirty-seven suffered a rebuff from nineteen-year-old Constance West, as his own father had twice in his youth from women he admired. If the older male was a widower with children, often enough the case at a time when women still all too frequently died in childbirth, there was the added duty to a slew of stepchildren. The physical and mental health of partners also preoccupied Victorian parents as they pondered consent.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 16